Minimal Linux distribution - Part 1: LFS

A little while back, I decided to take the plunge and build my very own Linux distribution using the Linux From Scratch project. Spoiler alert: it was a wild ride!

After plenty of hiccups, a few days of battling my own mistakes, and occasionally Googling things like “why the heck this thing is not booting?”, I finally got it up and running. And let me tell you, the feeling of seeing it boot for the first time? Absolute magic.

Welcome to the Bash Shell!

Behold: Top, showing just a handful of processes chugging along.

I was genuinely blown away by how fast and lightweight this thing is. Sure, it’s not quite production ready (it’s definitely not replacing my current daily driver, Linux Mint Debian Edition 6), but the experience of building it taught me so much.

Was it frustrating at times? Yes. Did I liked every second of it anyway? Also yes. If you’re curious about Linux internals and want a hands-on challenge, I can’t recommend Linux From Scratch enough. It’s an adventure worth taking!

This whole experience got me thinking, “How low can we go?” What’s the absolute bare minimum of software needed to boot this thing? Could I strip it down even more?

Linux From Scratch includes network support, GCC, Vim, and a bunch of other packages. But what if I will go smaller? A while back, I stumbled across an excellent Linux Foundation conference talk by Rob Landley on YouTube. In it, he shared his journey of creating Toybox (a interesting alternative to BusyBox) and demonstrated just how minimal you can go.
It got me wondering: could I pull that off too? Maybe use both BusyBox or Toybox to build a super-slim system? Or, for the ultimate challenge, could I write my own simple shell completely from scratch?

The possibilities are exciting and slightly terrifying. But hey, what’s life without a little experimentation?

Fingers crossed, hope in my next post, I’ll have some hands-on experience to share about this idea. So stay tuned!